Picador
Wizard & the Prophet
39,00 ₾In forty years, Earth’s population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups–Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces–food, water, energy, climate change–grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author’s insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.
World on the Wing
39,00 ₾Bird migration remains perhaps the most singularly compelling natural phenomenon in the world. Nothing else combines its global sweep with its inherent ability to engender wonder and excitement.The past two decades have seen an explosion in our understanding of the almost unfathomable feats of endurance and complexity involved in bird migration – yet the science that informs these majestic journeys is still relatively in its infancy.Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted writer and ornithologist Scott Weidensaul is at the forefront of this cutting-edge research, and A World on the Wing sees him track some of the most remarkable flights undertaken by birds around the world. His own voyage of discovery sees him sail through the storm-wracked waters of the Bering Sea; encounter gunners and trappers in the Mediterranean; and visit a forgotten corner of northeast India, where former headhunters have turned one of the grimmest stories of migratory crisis into an unprecedented conservation success.As our world comes increasingly under threat from the effects of climate change, these ecological miracles may provide an invaluable guide to a more sustainable future for ourselves. This is the rousing and reverent story of the billions of birds that, despite the numerous obstacles we have placed in their path, continue to head with hope to the far horizon.
Awakenings
29,00 ₾‘The story of a disease that plunged its victims into a prison of viscous time, and the drug that catapulted them out of it’ Guardian Hailed as a medical classic, and the subject of a major feature film as well as radio and stage plays and various TV documentaries, Awakenings is the extraordinary account of a group of twenty patients. Rendered catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War, all twenty had spent forty years in hospital: motionless and speechless; aware of the world around them, but exhibiting no interest in it until Dr Sacks administered the then-new drug, L-DOPA, which caused them, temporarily, to awake from their decades-long slumber. ‘A brilliant and humane book’ Observer ‘Not only a collection of astonishing case histories, Awakenings is also a memoir, a moral essay and a romance. It is a work of genius’ Washington Post ‘It makes you aware of what a knife edge we live on’ Doris Lessing
Master & Margarita
27,00 ₾The underground masterpiece of twentieth-century Russian fiction, Mikhail Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA was written during Stalin’s regime and could not be published until many years after its author’s death.
When the devil arrives in 1930s Moscow, consorting with a retinue of odd associates—including a talking black cat, an assassin, and a beautiful naked witch—his antics wreak havoc among the literary elite of the world capital of atheism. Meanwhile, the Master, author of an unpublished novel about Jesus and Pontius Pilate, languishes in despair in a pyschiatric hospital, while his devoted lover, Margarita, decides to sell her soul to save him. As Bulgakov’s dazzlingly exuberant narrative weaves back and forth between Moscow and ancient Jerusalem, studded with scenes ranging from a giddy Satanic ball to the murder of Judas in Gethsemane, Margarita’s enduring love for the Master joins the strands of plot across space and time.
Some Desperate Glory
25,00 ₾The story of World War I, through the lives and words of its poets The hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of what many believed would be the war to end all wars is in 2014. And while World War I devastated Europe, it inspired profound poetry―words in which the atmosphere and landscape of battle are evoked perhaps more vividly than anywhere else. The poets―many of whom were killed―show not only the war’s tragedy but also the hopes and disappointments of a generation of men. In Some Desperate Glory, the historian and biographer Max Egremont gives us a transfiguring look at the life and work of this assemblage of poets. Wilfred Owen with his flaring genius; the intense, compassionate Siegfried Sassoon; the composer Ivor Gurney; Robert Graves, who would later spurn his war poems; the nature-loving Edward Thomas; the glamorous Fabian Socialist Rupert Brooke; and the shell-shocked Robert Nichols―all fought in the war, and their poetry is a bold act of creativity in the face of unprecedented destruction. Some Desperate Glory includes a chronological anthology of the poets’ works, telling the story of the war not only through the lives of these writers but also through their art. This unique volume unites the poetry and the history of the war―so often treated separately―granting readers the pride, strife, and sorrow of the individual soldier’s experience coupled with a panoramic view of the war’s toll on an entire nation.
No Country For Old Men
25,00 ₾In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
